stles and Saints, the Blessed Mother of the
Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the
awfulness of Him, to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have
not yet dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the
other w the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest
and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour with equal
readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success.
If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin, possessing
warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object
of his earthly love to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful
homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as
a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards
Divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or
receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing,
for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how
sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his
own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his
spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type
of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?

But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism,
than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us. We see
cherubs by Raphael, whose baby innocence could only have been nursed
in paradise; angels by Raphael as innocent as they, but whose serene
intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things; madonnas by
Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve,
implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a
light which he never could have imagined except by raising his own
eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward. We remember, too, that divinest
countenance in the Transfiguration, and withdraw all that we have said.

Poor Hilda, however, in her gloomiest moments, was never guilty of the
high treason suggested in the above remarks against her beloved and
honored Raphael. She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves,
pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character
that won her admiration. She purified the objects; of her regard by the
mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.

Hilda's despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in
one respect, ha